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He wasn’t tricking himself? It was Avon.
Had he escaped his notice for half a year?
The stiff hesitant walk on a haughty backbone. The mannered head, slanting, gesturing, to nobody. Like an eccentric in soliloquy. And no left arm. None of it.
Misery tumbled in Blake, a cliff sliding. That can’t be Avon. The witty, vain, poised man he’d known –
Who behaved so bizarrely around me. As a charity I ought to have dumped him on a planet with a bag of jewels, told him, it isn’t that I don’t trust you, but I hate to tear people to paradoxical pieces.
Eyesight playing up again in his upheaval, Blake saw eyes too far away to see, a cripplingly ambiguous stare, lasting the two Liberator years. In fact Avon wandered dawdlingly, soliloquising, while Blake stalked him up and down the red laser fence. Internees were dressed in stripped-down troopers’ uniforms, no insignia, no undergarments and barefoot, with heads shaved against the itchy worm larvae. Yet Avon must know him at a glance, and walk astonished, thrilled, up to the fence between them. By lock-up time, Avon hadn’t glanced.
In the sheds, there was Regarta to be told. He’d abandon her. He didn’t kid himself about the consequences. Not that his companionship outweighed her obliterated fleet and her mastered Earth. But her courtesy to him did. So she’d asked his permission to hide her knife here, where it incriminated him too, five weeks ago, and not a mention of it since. Anticipating what from him? To leave her shed, give her freedom?
Now, he’d do just that. “I saw one of my Liberator crew today, in compound eight. Avon, who invented the detector shield for us and hoped, he said, to sell it to you. Maybe he did, at that.”
“Ours was nothing to do with him,” smiled Regarta. The hollows of her smiling eyes deepened. “I thought something marvelous had happened to you today. I’m gladder than you know.”
No, he knew. It made him brusque. “Why is that?”
Admiral Regarta Toll touched the grey down on her head, a military elegance to her tendony neck and wrist. She was sixty, a widow. Her Thirty-Third had fought on to the last flotilla after capture of her flagship. She’d had fever three times in here. The knife had been stolen from the kitchens by a major of the Twelfth. From the Thirty-Third, there were five troopers and half her flagship crew. Regarta thought she had failed in her duty. She’d only failed to be a casualty. It was difficult for Blake to preach to her.
She knew the roster keeper owed him.
“Roj, you cling to me. Go to compound eight.”
“I’d like to ask. Is the knife for you or them?”
“I’m a soldier.”
“You’re a leader. Your people need you. Not your own regiment, but have you forgotten homo sapiens? You fought poorly equipped, unprofessional dissidents from the day you were out of the academy – I never heard of you knuckling under then. What’s the matter? You don’t like it on the side I was always on? We’ve nothing going for us. But our determination. Then, you never knew what freedom was, did you? Why did I think you’d stick around to fight for it?” He’d never harangued her before.
“Roj. Don’t be upset over me.”
Later, they huddled together on her mat, kissed with mossy teeth. It was true, he’d clung to her, as if this stranger he’d been thrown into a livestock stall with, on the eleventh sector world where the Andromedans had interned POWs from the initial battle, were his four lost crew together. You can’t do a lot for the dead.
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Next day at the locking of the sheds, he stepped, as eager as if he’d found the last other human in the alien Milky Way, into the stall of Avon, Kerr, nonaligned combatant. After that he didn’t do a thing. Snatch him in his arms and stroke him dotingly. Inform him who he was. Avon’s eyes jumped about his face in a panicky refusal to believe.
At last, “Is it you? Blake?”
His throat unknotted. “Thought you’d forgotten me. Thought I dreamt you up too, yesterday. Where on earth were you? You weren’t in the next compound? And I never saw you? Where were you?” he demanded outraged.
“You’re dead,” stated Avon, tranquilly.
He’s not mad. Blake trudged to him. He’s not mad. Blake laughed, wiping his mouth with his wrist. “At the risk of being argumentative.” He knelt down, where Avon was, and lay a hand tightly on his right arm. “Avon, what happened? You lost your arm, in the battle? Do you know about the others?”
“No. Not since the flight deck. I’ve been in hospital. I’m just out. I thought, with that chest injury of yours – What’s wrong with you?” he interrupted himself, his wild eyes fidgety on Blake. “You look awful.”
His uncensored dismay touched Blake, and awkwardly jogged his memory. He’d forgotten, through yesterday and today. “Nothing’s wrong with me. Underfed and overshaved.” He himself tried not to stare rudely, at Avon’s murky yellowish skin, his scaldingly wet and dark eyes. Feverish? Early stages maybe. “You haven’t lost much weight.”
“You get flesh in hospital. Of what sort, question not – human perhaps. Hence my fatness. But that’s the last time I entrust myself to army medics. It was only lacerations when I went in.” He acted a vexed frown, and then an exquisite gleam transfigured his sick face. I chose right, thought Blake, even though Regarta, the day after tomorrow at the commandant’s fortnightly catechising dinner for majors and above, would strike her last strike for the Thirty-Third. “Where did you drop from? Pulling strings?” asked Avon, half querulous.
“I re-rostered. Easily done. I didn’t split up a thriving friendship?”
“Scarcely. Lieutenant Haydy had the eloquence of a baboon, and the elegance too. I can’t live like this with you. What Federation worthy were you in with?”
The sentence between the other two was a mistake. Avon out of it enough to slip up on distinguishing what he thought from what he said. He glanced Blake in the eye like a stab of anxiety – did I say that? – and away. The fishhook wrinkle he’d always had, down from the corner of his mouth, had buried itself in.
Blake answered his last, hasty question, and stood up, feigning curiosity about his new stall. As he rambled about Admiral Toll, and rambled around the three meters of shed, he thought, you’ll have to, Avon, if you’ve the fever.
Old iron walls, two mats on the straw for bedding, a water trough, a waste bucket. Humiliating for Avon, but –
Irony, Blake had decided – once out of shock – the day Avon, in his worst academic disquisitional way, gave him to understand he had unorthodox leanings and they leant towards him. Blake had kept a ruminative and skeptical face, though lost for a riposte, and Avon had ceremoniously left. Mission achieved or not, Blake didn’t know. That was the last he heard of it. Except now and then Avon threw his arms around him. Is he trying to be even more difficult to live with? Is he alienating me? Did he predict I’d point him to the teleport? Blake thoroughly ignored it.
But underneath, it was no joke. With time he thought differently about it.
“… waste of patriotism,” he heard himself winding up, having told an exhaustive tale of Admiral Toll, while Avon pulled himself together. Then he crouched for a drink at the trough.
“And you see the potential, do you, Blake, or do you not?”
“Potential of what?” He looked over his shoulder at Avon, neatly knees up, his trooper’s black way oversize.
“Did that narration have any purpose?”
“Not much.” He grinned. Grinned at a quarter of the weight off his soul. If Liberator had run, the battle result would have been the same and the crew could have lived on in deep space. But he’d had Avon promise him. He passed out in medical bay, to wake up among defeated troopers, none of whom had news of his people.
“You haven’t learned, have you, Blake?”
“What would you like me to learn, Avon?”
“Creative escape. You’re slower than on the London. There you thought up my escape plan simultaneously as I did. Where’s your penetration into the darker coils of the mind, Blake? I never had to indelicately spell things out to you before.”
Blake hadn’t lost the knack. “I’m slow from being out of your company. I’ve caught up now.”
“Ah. You’d only just met me on the London. I thought I must have had ruthless cad tattooed on my forehead.”
“Not quite. You stuck it out like a sore thumb. That’s why I knew you’d think of it. That’s why I knew you wouldn’t go through with it.”
“Did you? Then why the rigmarole?”
“Why yours, Avon? Coy?”
“No.” He thrust his chin up and said with civilized indolence, “We squeal on your admiral. Our hosts need human workers for human technology. What’s conquering if you can’t figure out the spoils? Like any other military drones, the Andromedans understand loyalty. We demonstrate our loyalty. And we’re out of here.”
“And Admiral Toll is shot.”
“Isn’t that her dearest wish?”
“Not through me, Avon.” Blake drank again at the trough, dried his hand on the knee of his uniform, rose from his crouch.
“You’re fond of Federation admirals these days?”
“We’re in this together. The troopers see it that way. I haven’t had any problems, have you?”
“Blake,” he heard liltingly behind him. “Keep up with me. Or get left behind.”
The ridiculous thing, the thing he found himself howling at, being that Avon wasn’t going anywhere. Least with him here. “I doubt they’d sign on a freedom fighter, Avon. But you, number two in the Federated Worlds, if Vila wasn’t dramatising. Known for your neutrality. Known to sell to the market.” He stared down into the trough, amazed at the toy he was to his guilt. “You’ve a day and a half. Do it tomorrow morning. I’ve Vila, Jenna and Cally to think about. As we’re alive, even combatants, I think we’re to be labour. Once the Andromedans have mopped up. Regarta’s like Cally. Ashamed to live. I know about that. Outlived the Freedom Party. Outlived my family. Lived through my hijacking of the London. Alive and kicking after Control. Thought I was the last of the crew, until I saw you. What do you do with luck like that? Regarta doesn’t care whether she stabs any greenies or not. It isn’t about requital. So you go ahead. I’m why you’re in this camp. I’d even go with you to see you off the premises. I can’t, though. I’ve spent six months in a cattle shed with her trying to keep her alive. I had nothing else to do. I had nobody else to help. I even fell half in love with her. I slept with her. Yet I left her compound, Avon. Maybe you can work out for yourself, the most you can do for me is collaborate with the Andromedans and get yourself out of here. You needn’t worry about me. I intend to live to fight them. When I’m out, I’ll look for you. I can use you.” Back to Avon, he waited for him to speak. At half a sentence, he’d know what Avon was going to do.
“Quite a romance I split up.”
Avon wasn’t leaving.
“I apologise for sending your inamorata to a firing squad. As for you, I’ll send you food parcels if I can.”
It was nearly funny, except it wasn’t. He’d watched Avon for two and a half years, and half of every day Avon brooded about him. Which tends to grab the curiosity, and he thought he’d finally figured the thing out.
My nadir was telling him he hates me. Star One’s to blame, when you’ve a foot over the precipice of hating yourself, you pick on a likely suspect to do it for you.
Now he thinks he’s going to get a fellow prisoner shot. If he chooses to. Later he’ll choose not to on feasible grounds. That’s how a nihilist with a generous temperament lives with himself. And he lived with me, through a similar method.
That information upon his unorthodox leanings wasn’t just more fee-fi-fum. When did he ever shrink from, or dissimulate to others, a sordid truth? He must have been desperate for feasible grounds not to desert or mutiny.
With his bottled-up – what? it must be a heady brew by now – I tell him he hates me. Leave him to brood on that for six months, then urge him to desert me. He’ll be a lunatic before I’m done.
Blake trod around to face him. Empty left sleeve tied up, skinny head on a baggy uniform, the eyes of a petrified animal. Blake ought to say boo. Or gently, gently. He so pitied him he wanted to give him his loophole himself. “I’ve tonight to enjoy quarrelling with you then,” he said, fated to play along.
“As I am not as charming as an aged Federation admiral, yes.”
As he must not smile, Blake chewed the inside of his cheek. Nevertheless his playing along was recklessly near to satire. “You know what happens in severely restricted precincts. Prisons, spaceships. Strange loves.” It led him onto sermonising. “Funny, though, how mental it is. I was anxious for her, I start to desire her. To her it was the human thing, and forgetting. Me, I sensed she’d given up and I was scared.”
“How poignant.”
His bottom lip, where the fishhook was, twitched off his teeth. His fingers, the five of them, idly played with straw. Blake could half theorise, and half feel, the beast of passion he had in him, at the end of its tether with the knowledge of what he was going to do tomorrow. Which he wouldn’t do. He never did. “Ever happened to you?” Blake inquired. “Thinking yourself into a physical state?”
“Am I mistaken, or is that the definition of hysteria?”
“Can I look at your arm?”
“Try the incinerator.”
“Can I look at your amputation? Is it a bad job?”
“It was a hatchet job, at a guess, unhappily I missed it.”
Blake ditched the notion of permission, squatted next to him and unclipped the neck of his uniform.
“Oh don’t mind me,” Avon told him urbanely.
The knob of his shoulder was a fresh pink, the seam knitted up. There were old bedsores on his shoulderblade, scabbed over. “At least I can push harder than you,” was Blake’s only comment.
“Unless I am standing behind you. On the edge of a cliff.”
It perked him up that Avon had problems with his sense of humour too. “I doubt it would worry me.” After clipping him up again, he dropped his arm to his knee in his squat, meditating on the iron in front of him. “From what I’m told, you’d be sidetracked in your sinister schemes. By my animal magnetism.” He gnawed his lip. “Which I must remark, is nothing if not suspiciously lucky for you.”
In an odd drawl Avon countered, “Lucky, Blake, for you.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?” And he looked up, into his eyes, with the zeal of trusting a man who mistrusts himself.
Avon kissed him.
He did nothing under it, as Avon kissed at his mouth, religiously earnest, as he always was when you dug. Blake touched his elbow, nothing else.
I can’t free him from me. I’m years too late. Where’s he to end up? What do I do?
The pushing lips had shut. He was left achingly wet around the right of his mouth, which he didn’t wipe.
Avon perused the far side of the stall. “Acquisition of data,” he said. “You owed me.”
“Admittedly. Learn anything?”
“It was a personal thirst for knowledge of no significance to you.”
“Before you go tomorrow.”
“That’s right,” he agreed abstractly, and leant his shaven head against the iron, remote speculation on his face, as cloistered as an anchorite.
Now Blake had to withdraw to noninterference while he twisted his brain up the night through. “Disquieting exit. I won’t forget you in a hurry.” Hoisting himself up, he walked over to the other mat, stamped it into the straw for heat, and lay himself down. If it were any use, he’d order Avon to sleep. “Wake me if you’re bored without me.” Arms crossed on his chest, he closed his eyes – he could but pave the way. “Or if that touch of fever you have worsens.”
“I don’t have a fever.”
By morning he may have. Too badly to negotiate himself up to the commandant. Even me washing his sweat has to beat leaving me behind, though it’d be close.
The paradox is, it’s the rigorous honesty of his thinking, astray though I find it. How could he leave, without my ship and jewels, without cashing me in? He’d be a fraud and he isn’t a fraud. He mustn’t admire me, not with his brain. But with his senses, and with those few stripped-down, austere, frighteningly pure emotions he can trust to be unerroneous, he loves me.
I’ve never encountered the equal of his integrity. How can I say so to him?
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